Category Archives: Uncategorized

You probably know that this weekend marks the end of Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the US. While I despise the idea of losing an hour in the spring, I do appreciate the concept of sleeping in another hour in the fall.

Actually, I think the whole concept of DST is bogus. In fact, the concept of time zones makes no sense in the 21st century. Modern life is a 24/7 experience without the need to tie it to the “noon is when the sun is overhead” paradigm.

DST is obsolete.

My proposal is to take the best of DST, which is gaining an hour in the fall, and expanding it for maximum  benefit. Therefore, we would never do the “spring forward” part of DST but always just slip an hour in the fall. I recognize that this will work great the first year but over time we’ll accumulate quite a bit of clock skew.

To keep this from being a problem, we’ll abandon local time all together and just rely on UTC (Coordinated Universal).  Businesses, schools and government agencies would need to translate UTC to the needs of the local situation. Instead of starting work at 8:00 AM local time, enterprises in the US would start work at, say 14:00 UTC. It is a simple matter of doing the math and keeping things straight.

Then every year in the fall, we’d slip UTC by one hour to give us another hour of sleep. How can anyone object to that?

– 73, Bob K0NR

Here is a funny comic that I came across recently (thanks Kelly AB9RF):

“Spinal Tap” is a reference back to the classic Rob Reiner film This is Spinal Tap, where Nigel explains the value of an amplifier gain control that goes all the way to eleven.

For more fine, sophisticated Spinal Tap culture, see the fan web site or the official Spinal Tap site.

73, Bob

You’ve probably heard that RadioShack is rebranding itself to be The Shack. This has triggered another round of criticism of RadioShack stores, with the usual tired references to “Rat Shack”, “Radio Schlock”, or worse.

Apparently, RadioShack has failed to live up to the expectations of the technorati. Well, it is true: RadioShack is the worst chain of electronics store in the US. It is also the best chain of electronics store in the US. That is, it is the only one we have with any breadth of coverage. (The RS web site claims that 94 percent of America lives or works within 5 minutes of a RadioShack store or dealer.)

So what’s going on here? Electronics experimenters, computer geeks and ham radio enthusiasts all lust after having a local store that stocks all of the parts and trinkets that they’ll ever need, with knowledgeable staff and reasonable prices. We want RS to be the electronic equivalent of the local hardware store. In reality, RS is more like the local Walgreens store than a hardware store — offering up what sells quickly and not always what we want.

So now remove RS from the picture — imagine that all of their stores closed overnight. Would our access to electronic treasures improve? I don’t think so. In fact, we’d really be hosed in most parts of the US. (If you have a great electronics store nearby, count your blessings.)

There are some RadioShack stores that operate above the norm — they are usually the franchise stores that are not owned by the RS corporation. These stores augment the RS product offering with product that serves their local community. One example is my local RS: Tri-Lakes Electronics in  Monument, Colorado. They do a pretty decent job serving their customers and I try to give them business whenever possible.

You might hypothesize that something better could evolve out of today’s RS (something more substantial than a “rebranding”). When I think of this possibility, I imagine larger stores and better product selection. I don’t think it is realistic to have a deep stock of every possible transistor, capacitor, resistor and integrated circuit… this might work in San Jose but not across the US.  I do think RS could be a stronger supplier of computer networking gear, connectors, cables and adapters (the things that it takes to make all of the electronics stuff work). A bit more like Fry’s Electronics but without the appliances and Jolt cola. (Interestingly enough, Fry’s has plenty of detractors, so serving the ‘tronics market appears to be a tough gig.) I also think some (not all) of RS products need an upgrade in quality (e.g., their RG-8 cable is lean on shielding…and where is the 9913 Flex equivalent?). A thorough scrubbing and makeover of the product list could really help.

So if you were in charge of RadShack, how would you change it?

And would you make any money at it?

73, Bob K0NR

The February 2009 shutdown of analog TV is approaching fast so I am actually starting to prepare for it. I previously wrote about this topic in Here Comes Digital TV. The FCC has asked the ARRL (really the amateur radio community) for help in getting the word out. This request emphasizes information sharing, not hands-on installation and troubleshooting of DTV systems. This is going to be interesting to watch….people that are served by cable or satellite are likely to be buffered from this change. The Over The Air User may have a different experience.

The FCC is pushing these settop converter boxes that allow people to convert their old analog TVs to digital. They will probably work fine for many people, especially if they have some technical knowledge. I really wonder about the less sophisticated consumers that are already struggling with their VCR and TV combo….now with a converter box in the middle of the system. “Let’s see, to record off the air I set the VCR to Channel 3 and the converter box to Channel 8 and then….” I am thinking there will be quite a few analog TVs headed to the trash heap. (Please recycle responsibly.)

An additional wrinkle that I just realized is that many of the VHF television stations are are moving to UHF for digital….but they will keep their existing channel designator. It turns out that the DTV system is defined such that the channel number that the user sees has nothing to do with the actual over-the-air channel that is used. For example, an analog TV station on VHF Channel 4 might move to UHF channel 35 for DTV but still be called “Channel 4” on the DTV screen. This is supposed to keep things simple for the consumer. This will work out OK if the consumer has a TV antenna that handles both VHF and UHF. However, in some regions VHF is so dominant, people may not have bothered with a UHF-capable antenna. They will have to make an antenna change to receive the new DTV signals.

In Denver it is going to be even more interesting. Channels 7 and 9 are starting out on UHF for their digital broadcasts and then will move back to VHF after the analog signals go off the air. This leaves them on their original VHF channel after the dust settles. So a viewer watching digital Channel 7 needs to view them on UHF Channel 17 right now, but it will be referred to as Channel 7. Later, their DTV signal will move over to the “real” VHF Channel 7.

This is going to be interesting.

73, Bob K0NR

Update 22 Dec 2008:

Take a look at this humorous video about the Digital TV transition:

http://www.wca.org/davidw/digitalconversion.wmv

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Having recently commented (whined?) about the huge about of email spam clogging the internet, I now turn to the same issue with POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). At our house, we use caller ID and answering machine call screening to deal with most solicitors. This has been remarkably effective. With the election growing near, the politicos are spending a ton of money on these robot autodialers (robocall) that call and leave a recorded message. Although I don’t have to listen to these idiotic messages, they do fill up the answering machine.

Before you tell me to register with the United States Do Not Call Registry, don’t bother. We are registered but it doesn’t apply to political organizations. (Seems that Congress thinks there is some special Freedom of Speech issue here.)

Here is an idea that I have tried and it seems to help. The telephone system has a number of special signaling tones that indicate the status of a phone line, called Special Information Tones. These tones basically tell the calling device that the dialed number has a problem. I recorded these tones at the beginning of our outgoing voice message, followed by my usual “Sorry we can’t take your call right now” greeting. The idea is that a machine calling will hear the tones and give up, while a human will ignore them and listen to the message.

Click here for the sit-tone

I’ve had this running for a few days, and the success rate appears to be about 80%. I still see incoming political calls on the Caller ID but most don’t make it to the answering machine. A few still get through…probably because the calling device ignores the SIT tone.

This is Bob K0NR and I approve this message.

73, Bob K0NR

The Phone Losers of America web site champions pranks of all kinds, especially ones associated with technology. One of their standard pranks is taking over the radio communication system used at the drive-up window of fast-food restaurants.

They really out did themselves by creating a video that describes how to mod a CB radio to work on fast food restaurant frequencies. (Hmm, it seems unlikely that a 27 MHz transceiver could be easily modified for VHF.) Oh, I see, they use a special crystal found in modern day toasters. That explains it.

Warning: some adult language

Be sure to look at the comments on the video. The prank keeps on going.

I do not condone nor support modifying radios for out-of-band operation, hassling employees of fast food restaurants or posting hilarious videos on youtube.com 🙂

73, Bob K0NR

I have this blog configured so that all comments are moderated. It seems that without this, spammers and scammers like to post all kinds of useless stuff. So when you post a comment, it may take a day or two for me to notice it and process it. (It depends on my schedule, of course.)

I generally approve any comments that have substance. If you just rant and rave, it will go into the bit bucket. I usually reject anonymous comments, so please include your first name and amateur radio callsign when you post a comment.

I do appreciate your thoughts, so keep them coming!

Although I am very much a techie, I often lag in adopting the latest consumer technology. I don’t need to be the first one on my block to own the latest gizmo, since that usually means paying more for less, compared to waiting until next year. However, since our household has this pressing “need” for a new television, it forced me to confront this business of Digital TV and HDTV.

The FCC has decided that good, old analog TV will end in February 2009. Many, but not all, television stations are already transmitting in digital format, whether high definition or not. After February 2009, the analog transmitters will be pretty much shut down. This makes me wonder how this is really going to play out as the general public seems to be rather clueless about the great analog-to-digital switch that is coming. Sure, they are starting to buy those super-sized big screen HDTVs to watch The Big Game. But do they realize that the little 19-inch color tube will go dark in 2009? Consumer information is starting to show up on various web sites telling the general public about the change. The NTIA is running a coupon program to subsidize converter boxes to keep those old analog TVs running. It seems that the feds felt a little guilty taking Grandma’s TV away while pocketing the money from selling the vacated spectrum.

This will directly affect viewers that receive the signal over the air. Television viewers that get their signal from cable or satellite are likely to be buffered from the change to digital by the settop box that decodes the signal for them. I also stumbled across an exemption for Low Power TV stations and translators. Translators are used in rural areas to retransmit television signals from the larger metro areas. Apparently, the FCC decided to not force the digital transition out in the sticks.

We brought the DTV home and hooked it up. Its role in life is to be the kitchen TV, where there happens to be no convenient TV antenna jack. (I’ve got a decent VHF/UHF TV antenna on the roof of the house that picks up signals from two major cities, Denver and Colorado Springs, but the coax doesn’t go to the kitchen.) Anticipating the problem, I bought a $10 “rabbit ears plus UHF loop” antenna to get the TV on the air quickly. I figured this would be a dismal failure and the next job on the list will be fishing RG-6 cable up through the wall. To my surprise, the DTV picked up all of the Colorado Springs stations flawlessly. And I do mean flawlessly…that’s the thing about digital…the signal is either there or not. Previously, on analog TV, we’d see all kinds of interesting lines and snow come and go, depending on the phase of the moon and the multipath distortion off the nearby mountains. But the digital picture is rock steady. Really impressive. I temporarily hooked the DTV to the roof antenna and the Denver stations popped in picture perfect as well.

One by one, the analog stuff in my house is converting to digital. The biggest exception: amateur radio equipment.

Holy Freaking Cow! Try to count all of those cellphones. From Reuters:

HELSINKI, Nov 29 (Reuters) – Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion — equivalent to half the global population — on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said. Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world.
“The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth,” Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement.

This does not necessarily mean that half of the people in the world have cellphones…some people own more than one. But still, who would have thunk it? No wonder 2 Meters is so quiet….everyone is busy yakking on the phone. In the race for number of wireless devices, the cellphone has beaten the 2M handheld. See my posting about my cool dualband rig.

Now, if we could just get people to use the vibrate mode on the phones, so I don’t have to listen to several billion obnoxious ring tones.

73, Bob K0NR

I picked up a new rig the other day. It is a dualband handheld radio that supports the latest digital formats. It has a number of innovative features that are not very common in ham radio equipment. The text messaging feature allows you to send simple ASCII messages to other radio users. The built-in MP3 player can play tunes via the built-in speakers or a stereo headset. The microSD memory slot allows for easy change out of stored tunes and expansion of memory. This rig is compatible with Bluetooth headsets which puts the “wireless” back in wireless. It has a really nice color display that can display “wallpaper” to personalize the device.

The rig includes some very handy features such as a world clock, calendar and calculator. You never know when you might need to calculate the length of a dipole antenna or the resonant frequency of an LC circuit. The battery life on standby is an amazing 16 days. A 1.3 Megapixel camera allows you to take photos and store them to the memory card slot. The two frequency bands are 800 MHz and 1900 MHz.

Yeah, that’s right, it is a Verizon cell phone (LG VX-8300).

In Electronic Design magazine, Louis Frenzel wrote an article, “Whatever Happened to the Electronics Hobbyist?”

Electronics used to be one of the greatest hobbies ever. There were literally hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people who used to play around with electronics as an avocation or part-time interest and activity. There were at least a dozen magazines supporting this group and plenty of parts and kits suppliers to keep them happy. Kids learned electricity and electronics in school. As a result, when they ended up getting the bug, they ended up not only adopting electronics as a hobby, but also made it into a career. You don’t see too much of that going on anymore. So what the devil happened to the electronic hobbyist?

Louis goes on to say that electronics tinkering at the component level has largely disappeared but that the “Systems Hobbyist” is alive and well. This is a good article, with insight into the electronics hobby, including ham radio. Worth reading…click here.

73, Bob K0NR

I was getting ready for a trip. Of course, I need to take along my electronic toys, I mean, necessities. There’s the mobile phone, the iPod, the ham radio gear, the digital camera and lots of other stuff. As I gathered up the toys, I surveyed the required support gear, which includes various forms of batteries and those dang power converters. You know the ones, the so-called “wall warts” that convert the AC line voltage to the required DC level. The only problem is that each little electronic gadget seems to require a different power level. Even if the voltage is the same, the plug size or polarity is sure to be different.

Not too long ago, I was writing about the virtues of the USB (Universal Serial Bus) standard. It has really simplified the plugging in of gadgets associated with computers. Not so with the DC power converter problem. It almost seems like the manufacturers make all of their profit off the power converter, so they are motivated to keep them non-standard and hard to find.

I try to explain where all of these power converters come from. I have (literally) piles of them from different pieces of equipment that have probably already been tossed onto the scrap heap. That’s another thing….why don’t they consistently label the power converters so you know what piece of equipment that are meant to serve? I’ve got power converters for rechargeable flashlights, for (radio) scanners, for handheld ham radios, for digital cameras, for MP3 players, for notebook computers, for computer scanners, for mobile phones, ….the list just seems to never end.

OK, let me say something positive here. I’ve noticed that some power converters have adopted switching regulators which let them handle a range of line voltages from 100 to 240 VAC. This is great for people that travel outside the U.S. You may still need an adapter to get the plug to fit the wall outlet but the power converter can handle virtually any line voltage around the world. Nice!

Back to complaining —- why can’t they just standardize on two or three power adapters, with a specified DC voltage and connector size? This could be the biggest ease-of-use breakthrough for the electronics consumer since the invention of the AA battery.

— 73, Bob K0NR

Back in April, I wrote about how various sources of audio are Competing for Ears. John Dvorak in his PC Magazine blog recently wrote about The Death of Radio. Interesting, he did put a slight plug in for the “underappreciated amateur/ham radio community.” (Thanks, John.) But his main point is that broadcast radio sucks. I agree, for the most part. It is the rare broadcast station that is really worth listening to. Most of them have way too much advertising and the program formats are too constrained.

73, Bob K0NR

In the online world, you’ll hear people talking about competing for eyeballs. That is, web sites, blogs, advertisers, search engines, etc. are all trying to get people to look at their stuff. This is an extension of television, where broadcasters attempt to capture your attention and have you watch their channel.

I’ve noticed that I have a similar issue with audio sources…there is extreme competition for my ears. Here are the things that I find myself listening to, all of which are screaming out for more than their fair share of attention (in no particular order):

• AM/FM car radio with CD player
• HiFi Audio system at home (includes AM/FM receiver and CD player)
• iPod mp3 player (music / podcasts)
• Mobile telephone
• VHF/UHF FM Mobile Ham Radio Transceiver
• VHF/UHF FM Handheld Transceiver (HT)
• HF Ham Transceiver
• Police/Fire Scanner
• Weather radio
• Notebook PC Sound Card (mp3 music, etc.)

I have left out some potential audio sources that have fallen out of favor:

• Shortwave receiver
• Walkman (cassette tape)
• Discman (CD player)

Of course, there are some very important non-electronic devices that must be listened to:

• Wife
• Kids
• Other people

There are two main chunks of time when this audio competition exists. The first is when driving my car. Clearly, we live in a mobile society, spending way too much time driving from place to place. I tend to listen to audio content while driving since it helps make use of the time and is (mostly) compatible with driving. Other media such as books or video displays are not recommended while driving.

The second chunk of time is when I am doing something around the house that doesn’t require complete concentration. I like to have something to listen to in the background. Often this is music but it might just as well be other audio sources.

What does this have to do with ham radio? Plenty. I find that my ham transceivers are getting displaced by these other audio sources. It seems that there is no end to alternative things to listen to and my on-the-air radio operating is declining. The biggest winner is my iPod, offering an endless supply of commercial-free music and a wide variety of podcasts, all customized to fit my listening preferences. There are even podcasts about ham radio, so ham radio is competing with itself.

The biggest loser is good old AM/FM broadcast radio. I find myself turning off the AM/FM radio, tired of the stale format and endless commercial advertisements of the broadcast stations. I really think broadcast radio is in deep trouble.

Is this just a trend or just a fad? I think it is a trend. What do you think?

73, Bob K0NR